Contents

Opening Comments

Apache, along with PHP and MySQL, is very straight forward to install on a stock LinkStation 1 with the OpenLink firmware installed. If you have experience with building these packages, or compiling in general, it is a snap. If you have little or no experience in such matter, just follow the guide -- everything is reversible.

If you have not already done so, visit the Openlink section and follow the instructions for installing the telnet enabled firmware. You will also need to download and install the PPC Tools before continuing.

A Remark on "--prefix"

The prefix argument, which you will see in every section below, allows you to install Unix packages to alternate locations. This is very important is the case of the LinkStation since all three packages take over 75 megs to install. You will not be able to install these packages to your root partition and doing so would be very bad.

I chose to create an "opt" directory under "/mnt/" to install each of these packages too, using a separate directory for each. This was done to keep the packages separated and easy to manage in the future. You may, of course, alter your install locations in any way but, if you are new to this, I suggest following my example.

It's also a good idea to create a directory to download stuff when using wget, lets use /mnt/misc

MySQL

Begin with MySQL. If you do not wish to compile MySQL support into your system, please skip to the next section.

cd /mnt/misc

Download the latest recommended release of MySQL from http://www.mysql.com (4.1.20, at the time of this edit).

Apache 1.3.xx

Apache itself is the next install. If you are not planning on installing PHP, you may ignore the "--enable-module=so" attribute below.

I decided to install Apache 1.3 because that is what my web host uses. Installing Apache 2 would be very similar and the following instructions can be easily adapted by reading the INSTALL document in the Apache 2 tarball.

./configure --prefix=/mnt/opt/apache --enable-module=so
make
make install

You should get this message -

+--------------------------------------------------------+
| You now have successfully built and installed the |
| Apache 1.3 HTTP server. To verify that Apache actually |
| works correctly you now should first check the |
| (initially created or preserved) configuration files |
| |
| /mnt/opt/apache/conf/httpd.conf
| |
| and then you should be able to immediately fire up |
| Apache the first time by running: |
| |
| /mnt/opt/apache/bin/apachectl start
| |
| Thanks for using Apache. The Apache Group |
| http://www.apache.org/ |
+--------------------------------------------------------+

You will, at the very least, need to change your port to 81 (or some other port).

vi /mnt/opt/apache/conf/httpd.conf

Search for '80' -- change it to '81' (or some other port).

I also suggest changing the root directory to the files to "/mnt/hda/share/www" so you can have easy access to them over the Samba share. Search for 'DocumentRoot' and change the first reference (roughly line 288) to the above path. Search again and you will find another reference to change (around line 313).

Finally, start the server.

/mnt/opt/apache/bin/apachectl start

Copy that start up script to /etc/init.d and include in startup shutdown

PHP

Last we will set up PHP. I decided to install the latest version of PHP4 because, again, this is what my web host uses. You may decide to install PHP5, which would requires only 1 slightly different step below.

IMPORTANT

Pay special attention to the 'configure' command below. If you installed the above packages to an alternate location you will need to update the paths in the proper attribute.

cd /mnt/misc

Download the latest version of PHP4 from http://www.php.net (4.4.2, at the time of this edit).

+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
| License: |
| This software is subject to the PHP License, available in this |
| distribution in the file LICENSE. By continuing this installation |
| process, you are bound by the terms of this license agreement. |
| If you do not agree with the terms of this license, you must abort |
| the installation process at this point. |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
| *** NOTE *** |
| The default for register_globals is now OFF! |
| |
| If your application relies on register_globals being ON, you |
| should explicitly set it to on in your php.ini file. |
| Note that you are strongly encouraged to read |
| http://www.php.net/manual/en/security.globals.php |
| about the implications of having register_globals set to on, and |
| avoid using it if possible. |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+

make

You will get a message

Build complete.
(It is safe to ignore warnings about tempnam and tmpnam).

Then to finish

make install

Copy over the default config file.

IMPORTANT

If you altered the "--with-config-file-path" attribute, above, you will need to change the below command to copy to the appropriate path.

cp php.ini-dist /mnt/opt/php4/lib

Open up apache's conf file and verify that the following line is included: